Sisterhood of Suns: Daughters of Eve

by Martin Schiller

  “Of course,” Jeena said, patting her hand affectionately. “You only did what you had to.”

  “Great,” Maya said. “That’s all that then. We’re all just one big, happy spy-family.” Inwardly, she was anything but overjoyed. If Sarah didn’t care about men as she claimed, then she had just been robbed of her chance at revenge. It just wasn’t fair!

  She glared at Sarah. “That still doesn’t explain why you kicked me down to the Metros, or what this big shell game is for. While we’re at it—why is Josette here? And who is this ‘Conversâzi’?”

  “Before we provide you with the answers to that,” Jezzika said. “You’ll probably want some of this.” She produced a small flask and poured some of its contents into Maya’s teacup. Even before she took her first tentative sip, Maya knew it was some kind of strong alcohol.

  “Drink up,” Josette invited. “When we’re done with you, you’ll need all the fortification that you can get.”

  Maya drained her cup and impertinently held it out to be refilled. Jezzika promptly obliged her with another portion, and this, more than anything, frightened her out of her wits. Whatever this was all about, it was just as deadly serious as Josette was implying.

  “First, the Conversâzi,” Josette began. “They are a humble little collection of right-wing fanatics, led by my sister, Angelique. Their aim, at least as far as the rank and file are concerned, has been to overthrow our government and destroy what still remains of our democracy. As a step in that direction, Chairwoman bel Rayna was assassinated, and N’Calysher was chosen by the Conversâzi to succeed her”

  The look of bewilderment on Maya’s face was so blatant that it earned her more mocking laughter. “Yes, that’s right Maya—assassinated—by my sister, with a poison that made her death seem natural. But Layna n’Calysher has no idea that her term of office will be a short one. The moment that the time seems right, my sister intends to murder her as well, and have her daughter replace her as a figurehead Chairwoman. And if the girl is foolish enough to become a problem, then you can rest assured that the Lady Felecia will find her own resting place in the graveyard, right alongside her mother.”

  All the blood drained out of Maya’s face. She still felt anger towards Felecia for her betrayal, but she didn’t hate her enough to want her dead. And dead she would be if Angelique considered her to be an impediment to her goals.

  “I see that you grasp Angelique’s true nature,” Josette observed. “If the Lady Felecia fails to please Angelique, she will be eliminated. Felecia n’Calysher thinks of herself as a member of the Conversâzi, and she ardently supports their aims, but she has no idea how ruthless my sister actually is, nor just how numbered her days might be.’

  “Which brings me to the reason for my presence. The answer is simple enough; I know and fear my sister. My sibling, Silvi, refuses to accept that Angelique is as dangerous as she is. But I know that when Angelique achieves her aims, she won’t think twice about removing anyone that she perceives to be a threat, family or no.’

  “She did that very thing to my older sister, Odette. When Odette became an impediment to her becoming CEO of the Luxar Lines, she met with an unfortunate ‘accident’. Nothing that can be proven of course, but Odette’s death had Angelique’s biosignature all over it. I have no intention of meeting the same fate.’

  “It is sad to say, but this is nothing new for us. We Bel Thana’s have always been this way, or should I say, we Borgias? Blood is no impediment to murder for us, and never has been. So, I suppose that I joined Phantasma not out of patriotism, but out of a desire for self-preservation. As I see it, my sister must be stopped in order to afford me the pleasure of enjoying my old age.”

  This much, Maya could respect, and she saluted the woman’s pragmatism with her cup. They were not as dissimilar as she had first imagined, and either the strong drink, or Josette’s stark honesty were beginning to win her over. It also didn’t hurt that the woman was as good with a sword as she was. There was even the vague possibility that they would eventually become friends. Once Josette dropped her high and mighty attitude, of course.

  “Okay,” she said. “Now I know all about the Conversâzi, and your fekking bitch of a sister. So what? It sounds like they got what they wanted, or they will, soon enough.”

  Josette waved her conclusions into irrelevance. “Not by a light-year, my dear Maya. Angelique is not content with simply taking over the Sisterhood. She has much grander designs in mind. These involve the very things that you have been dreaming about. You have been having odd little visions about the Necropolis on Ashkele, have you not?”

  The question made Maya drop her teacup. “W-what do you know about that?”

  Josette grinned. “Oh Maya,” she said. “Your dossier indicated that you were dense, but I must admit that I had entertained my doubts! Now I can see that the agent who compiled it wasn’t exaggerating in the least’

  “Did you really think that your dreams were private? Lady Ananzi has been eavesdropping on them since the first day that you became her student. Would you like to see the recordings that she compiled? They really do make lovely viewing.”

  Maya shook her head. She didn’t want to see her visions replayed. She’d been tortured enough by them as it was.

  Sarah interrupted. “I have to disagree with all this. This process must not be interfered with. We should stop right here and let things take their natural course.”

  “And again, I have to insist otherwise,” Skylaar countered. “Maya deserves to know what kind of danger she is in, and what she can expect.”

  Maya interrupted them. “What danger? And what about my dreams? They’re just silly nightmares!”

  “They are not just ‘silly nightmares’ Maya,” Skylaar told her, “nor unimportant. Far from it in fact. You are at much greater risk than you might imagine. We all are. That is why I asked Josette to come here and help us to explain to you what is happening, and the part that you are fated to play.”

  “The part that I’m fated to play?” Maya demanded. The situation, which had seemed merely klaxxy to begin with, was now becoming positively warpy.

  Jezzika retrieved her abandoned cup and refilled it to the brim. The younger woman drank it down like it was so much water, and not the straight Aqqa that it actually was.

  “Yes, Maya. Fated,” Josette answered. “Or ‘chosen’ if you prefer, by the Galaxy Mind. The implications are the same.” She looked over to Skylaar, who produced a small armored case, which she set down on the mat.

  When the Nemesian palmed the bio-scanner on its face, the container opened to reveal a metallic sphere, roughly the size of a clenched fist. Peering closely at it, Maya saw that it was formed by a series of irregular bands, and everywhere, its surface was marred by deep pitting and scratches, suggesting great age and hard conditions.

  “Do you know what this is?” Skylaar asked her.

  Maya shook her head. “Nope. Not a clue.”

  “It is a recording device, and it is over 20,000 years old. We do not know who made it, but we do know that there are only three of these devices in the entire Galaxy. We have one, Angelique possesses another, and the third is owned by Queen Talaria of the Seevaans.”

  Skylaar waved her hand over the object, and the bands spun apart to reveal a hollow interior. An oily mist rose out of this, filling the air above it with an inky darkness that was the very antithesis of all light.

  Then a shimmering magenta glow appeared within the blackness, and Maya saw images beginning to form. Their perspective was twisted, and oddly flattened, and portions of them faded in and out of view. Other parts were only half-visible, suggesting that there were elements to the picture that existed in a band of light beyond human vision. Despite these flaws however, there was still a great deal that was plain enough.

  A cloudy, unknown planet basked in the light of a trinary star system, and a fleet of ships hovered menacingly above it. Their design was wholly unlike anything that the Sisterhood, or any of the
other races of the Far Arm employed, but just from their formation, it was obvious that they were warships of some kind.

  Another image came into being alongside this a half-second later. It was just as strangely distorted as the first, and what it depicted made Maya gasp as it came into focus. She knew the place, and the great crystalline Tree that resided at its heart, all too well.

  Great goddess, she thought. It’s real! This revelation terrified her down to her core, but she couldn’t turn her gaze away.

  Whatever was recording the event panned downwards, and Maya was not surprised when it stopped at the shallow pool at the base of the Tree. A trio of beings that were neither reptilian, mammalian, insectoid, nor anything she could readily identify, were there, linking appendages.

  One of them went into the pool until its form was completely covered over, and the scene depicting the alien fleet changed dramatically. The planet below it shattered into a billion pieces, and the armada was broken apart by the debris.

  The triple suns were the next to fall prey to whatever was causing all of this destruction. They swelled to hundreds of times their original size and then burst like so much overripe fruit. When the gigantic nova finally died away, nothing remained except an irregular cloud of expanding gas and bits of melted rock.

  At this, the entire sequence began to repeat itself and Skylaar allowed one more cycle to occur before she passed her hand over the sphere. The images vanished, and the device closed.

  Maya looked up from the artifact to meet Skylaar’s eyes.

  “Very few sentient beings are aware of the true significance of the Drow’voi ruins,” the Nemesian said. “Most xenoarcheologists believe that they are much like any other remnant of an extinct society, with living spaces, industrial complexes, houses of worship and so on.’

  “They are also wrong. The ‘Necropolis’ on Ashkele was never a graveyard, or even a city in any sense that we would understand.”

  “What is it then?” Maya asked, afraid to hear the answer.

  “A vast network of machines, “Josette replied, “based on a technology that we can only dimly comprehend.”

  Suddenly, bits and pieces of Maya’s dreams came together, uniting with snatches of intuition that until now, she had either ignored or discarded as pure nonsense. She knew exactly what the machines were, and what they could do. Her dreams had shown her.

  “It’s more than that,” she finally said hesitantly. “It’s not a weapon—not exactly--.”

  “But it can be, “Skylaar said, completing her statement. “One of unimaginable power. Compared to it, all of our starships and nova bombs are mere toys. Any race that possesses the Tree has the capability of ruling the entire galaxy.”

  “Anyone?”

  “Anyone who has control over the Three,” Jezzika elaborated, “and especially the User. Once the Tree has been unlocked, her companions are expendable, but she is not. From then on, she can operate the Tree all by herself.”

  This hadn’t been an element of her dreams. With the exception of the Drow’voi and her mysterious human ‘guide’, Maya had always been alone, and she hadn’t met anything that referred to itself as the Galaxy Mind.

  “The Three?” she asked, “you lost me with that and whatever this Galaxy-Mind-what’s-it’ is”

  “Very well. I will explain it slowly enough for you to understand,” Josette replied, leaning forwards for emphasis.

  “You see, Maya, the galaxy is not just a collection of mindless stars and so much interstellar gas. It is in fact, a sentient being, whose ‘cells’ if you will, are made up by all the living creatures that inhabit it, and it’s consciousness is the amalgamation of every mind that exists within its boundaries. The best analogy would be to compare it to ourselves. Every cell in our bodies is alive, and every cell makes us who we are. It is the same thing, but on a much vaster scale’

  “The Seevaans know all this of course, and they simply ‘neglected’ to inform us. Or to tell us about the most important part; for reasons that only the Galaxy Mind understands, every one thousand years it chooses a single race, and among them, three individuals. It communicates its will to the chosen Three through the agency of dreams and visions.”

  “Well that’s effective,” Maya returned acerbically. So far, all her dreams had managed to do was confuse her, and rob her of a lot of sleep.

  “It is much more reliable than you might imagine,” Josette corrected. “These dreams are utterly irresistible—as you well know. The chosen candidates who receive them ultimately have no options about obeying their mandate, or fulfilling their specific roles.”

  Hearing that she didn’t have a choice in the matter at all made Maya angry, and she began to mouth an objection. Then she felt Jezzika taur K’aut’sha’s restraining hand on her shoulder, and accepted another drink instead. She would have her say, she promised herself, once this lecture was over, and provided that she wasn’t too drunk.

  “Once they have been given their mission,” Josette continued, “the Three eventually unite, and make their way to the Tree. Once there, they unlock the device. Each one of them has a special role to play, similar to the basic process of accessing and using a computer; the mere presence of the Guide causes the Tree to leave its dormant state. She is the ‘on’ function, if you will, made flesh. She also has valuable knowledge of the Tree’s basic operation.’

  “The Singer provides the basic access code. Once this password has been received, the User is the one who actually operates the device and gives it its commands.”

  “So it takes three, huh?” Maya asked. “What if one of these Three decides she’s had enough of all this shess and just says no?” The question was more than merely academic. It was exactly what she was thinking of doing.

  “The results are not terribly positive,” Josette warned. “If any member of the Three fails to rendezvous with the others, or like you said, refuses their role, the Galaxy Mind simply passes the mission on to another race, and another trio. In such a case—and there have been a few—it often turns out to be a disaster for the original group, and their entire species.”

  “Um, define ‘disaster’,” Maya asked cautiously.

  “If the new race is inimical to the previous one, the end product can, and sometimes has been, genocide,” the other woman answered soberly. “Imagine for example, if we refused. Then imagine a Hriss trio assuming the role, or even a T’lakskalan one.’

  “Given the recording you just watched, that is not an option that I would care to see becoming reality. Oh, and by the way, Maya, just in case you haven’t already guessed—we are the current race that has custody of the Tree. Does this answer your question?”

  It did. All too well. Whether she wanted to or not, Maya knew that she had to go along with this madness. Whoever or whatever this Galaxy Mind was, it was definitely on her short list now, and when she got the chance, she intended to let it know just what she thought of it in the most colorful language that she could summon up.

  Josette went on. “Now, here is the most interesting part, and the feature which attracted my sister’s attention. As the recording amply demonstrates, once it has been unlocked, the Tree can grant virtually unlimited power to the User, and project it at an indefinite range, instantly. Anything that the User can visualize literally becomes reality. If they so desire it, they can wish an entire species into extinction, which is exactly what the Drow’voi did to themselves.”

  “The whole thing sounds like Zommie witchcraft to me,” Maya opined.

  “Indeed,” Skylaar agreed. “It might seem that way to you. The Tree is unlike anything that we know of. It has no recognizable components, no apparent power source, and according to the Pa’lla, it is composed of some form of organic crystalline substance that even they cannot identify. Yet it is there, and capable of doing amazing things that are beyond our current technological understanding.’

  “We can however place it in a context that makes it seem a little less fantastic. As you are aware,
our symbiotes can influence time, and the Seevaans are able to use them to affect physical matter. The Tree is the mother of all these devices, and with much greater reach. It can influence reality itself.’

  “It is, if you will pardon me, the very embodiment of the idea that the great visionary Arthur C. Clarke once suggested; a technology that is so highly advanced that it seems like sorcery to a less developed society like our own. I assure you however, there is nothing supernatural whatsoever about it, or what it can do.”

  “Wait, don’t you mean Arwen C. Clarke?” Maya asked, a little nonplussed by the reference. Arwen C. Clarke was one of the great female authors of the pre-Sisterhood era. Everyone knew that.

  “No, Maya,” Sarah informed her. “She doesn’t. There is a great deal about history that you are not aware of. That is a conversation best left for another time however.” She inclined her head to Josette, who picked up the narrative from there.

  “Given the immense power of this machine,” Josette said, ‘you can imagine that there have been many cases of considerable pressure being brought to bear upon the Three, and especially the User.’

  “There are even instances where the Three were assassinated by rival factions before the device could be turned against them. This is why, for the most part, the Tree’s existence, and the candidates who are selected, have been kept a carefully guarded secret. It is also the reason behind the name that my sister chose for it. She refers to it as the Secret. Unimaginative, I know, but descriptive nonetheless.”

  Keeping this quiet made perfect sense, Maya thought. She just hoped that no one knew about her ‘involvement’ outside of this room. If she was one of the Three as these women believed she was, then she had a huge target tattooed on her ass, and any number of beings, Angelique included, would want to tag it.

  What didn’t add up was what had happened to the Drow’voi. Ordinarily, she didn’t give a spacer’s damn about them, but suddenly their disappearance had assumed a new, and frightening relevance.

  “Okay, question time,” she announced, holding up her hand. “The Drow’voi. You said that they used this Tree-thingy to blow themselves up. Why do that? I think that’s kind of an important thing to know. Were they just klaxxy? Or is there something wrong with this Tree?”